September 25, 1966

Anything Goes

By WALTER ALLEN

THE TIME OF THE ANGELS
By Iris Murdoch.

ris Murdoch's novels have become predictable. We are presented with a group of characters knit together, and also isolated, by family ties, sexual attraction or both. They are for the most part admirably realized, existing in the round, convincing at the realistic level. Then, suddenly, it is as though they have all consumed ergot. They are whipped up into a frenzied dance in which normal inhibitions are broken down and anything goes.

In "The Time of the Angels," Carel Fisher, an eccentric Anglican priest, moves with his daughter Muriel, his ward and niece Elizabeth, and his colored West Indian servant and mistress, Pattie, into a rectory in London's East End, the one surviving house in an area obliterated by German bombs. In the basement are the caretaker, Eugene Pleshkov, a White Russian displaced person, and Leo, his son, a delinquent student.

They live as a beleaguered garrison, but they are a beleaguered garrison by choice; there are plenty of people eager to relieve them. There is Carel's brother Marcus, a schoolmaster who is one of Elizabeth's guardians, once taught Leo, and is writing a book on morality in a secular age. There is his friend Norah Shadox-Brown, active in Anglican affairs and a former teacher of Muriel. There is Mrs. Barlow, on the face of it a busybody, but who turns out to be the Bishop's spy and also an old flame both of Carel and Marcus.

These are the characters on the periphery of the action, do-gooders and therefore comic. At the center of the novel emerges a sort of willow-pattern-plate relationship between the characters. Eugene and Pattie fall in love, but Pattie cannot escape her thralldom to the god-like figure of Carel. Muriel, too, falls in love with Eugene and Leo falls in love with her. Muriel, however, has decided that he is to be Elizabeth's seducer; and it is while they are awaiting their chance to get into Elizabeth's bedroom that the pearl of surprise is disclosed.

After Miss Murdoch's other books, it isn't such a surprise. Muriel sees her father in bed with Elizabeth. Later, we learn that Elizabeth is not his niece but his illegitimate daughter. The novel reaches its climax when Muriel discovers her father unconscious after swallowing the sleeping tablets she has kept in case she decides to commit suicide. It is in her power to save him. She lets him die.

But though Iris Murdoch's novels have become predicable, they have not become less obscure. It is easy enough to say what "The Time of the Angels" is "about." It is about the difference between secular morality and the religious sense, between conventional enlightened disbelief and the agonizing awareness that God is dead. But this is to state it in general terms. In the specific terms of the novel itself, the obscurity remains, baffles and, indeed, seems willful, as though the author were withholding essential evidence.

Miss Murdoch writes, it's difficult not to feel, as the initiate of a mystery, possessed of secret knowledge. She isn't going to profane the mystery by letting us in on that knowledge. This comes out strikingly in her presentation of her characters. All but the two major characters are beautifully rendered. We can walk around them; we are taken inside their minds. Their motives are understandable. This is not true of the key figures, Carol and Elizabeth. They are seen, as it were, in a fixed hieratic stance. Carel speaks out once, when he tells Marcus that there is no God, that the death of God has set the angels free, and that "we are creatures of accident, operated by forces we do not understand." He adds: "We are the prey of the angels," and "Those with whom the angels communicate are lost."

Presumably, the angels have communicated with him and Elizabeth. But this, in the absence of any information about the nature of the angels, is to make obscurity more obscure, mystery even less penetrable.

Fortunately, this does not exhaust the interest of the novel. Miss Murdoch still excites and delights by what may be called her minor symbols -- her descriptions of an East End first fog-bound and then under snow and of Eugene's icon -- and by her ability to create, in Pattie and Eugene, characters convincingly emblematic of goodness and innocence. Here, mystery is genuinely embodied; the reader's imagination is addressed, responds and is satisfied.

Mr. Allen, a British biographer and essayist, is the author of "Writers on Writing" and "The English Novel."